The imposing architecture of the Hotel Lutetia dominates the corner of Rue de Sevres and Rue de Babylone in Paris. The hotel has been renowned for more than a century for its beautifully decorated rooms, its impeccable service, and, not all that surprisingly for a Parisian luxury hotel, its gourmet restaurant. But this fine hotel has not always been simply a hotel. When the German Army entered the city during WWII, its commanders requisitioned the hotel to act as the Headquarters of the Abwehr Leitstelle, the French branch of the German Army’s secret service.a And, in order to keep the hotel operating, the German army kept a significant part of the hotel staff on in their usual jobs.
This created a number of conflicts of interest for the retained staff. One of the most critical problems centered on the restaurant’s impressive wine cellar that included some of the most prestigious and expensive French wines to be found in the city. The hotel staff took pride in the quality and variety of the cellar. So much pride, in fact, that when it became clear that the German Army would requisition the Lutetia, they decided they had to do something to protect the cellar. The decision was quickly made to eradicate all traces of the cellar, believing that if it were ‘forgotten’ it would survive the war. The staff proceeded to wall up the door that led to it and to hide or destroy all copies of the wine list. From an organizational point of view, the cellar was ‘forgotten’ by the hotel.
But it was not quite so simple. The new occupants of the building became suspicious when the staff claimed they could not serve wines selected by the German officers to accompany their meals, and their suspicions grew stronger when wine lists dating from the pre-occupation days were found. Upset by this evidence, the German officer in charge of logistics ordered a thorough search for the wine cellar, and then demanded to see the building’s blueprints. To his great frustration, he could find neither and, faced with more pressing problems than a mysteriously absent wine cellar, dropped the matter.
After the war, and following a brief stint as a sorting center for returning French prisoners of war, the Lutetia once again became a luxury hotel. As the staff had hoped, the cellar had survived the war unscathed, and once the door was restored, the restaurant once again had one of the finest wine cellars in Paris. However, by that time all copies of the old wine list had disappeared, and the hotel had to embark on the time consuming task of making a new inventory of the cellar; a problematic task as old wines don’t like to be disturbed and the task involved re-cataloguing the whole cellar bottle by bottle.
The story of the Hotel Lutetia raises a number of interesting questions for researchers interested in organizational knowledge. First, the decision to organizationally ‘forget’ the wine cellar highlights the fact that although the focus in the literature has been on organizational learning, in some situations organizations may need to get rid of existing knowledge rather than develop new knowledge; in other words, to forget rather than to learn (Bettis and Prahalad, 1995; Hedberg, 1981; Lyles and Schwenk, 1992; Nystrom and Starbuck, 1984; Starbuck, 1996). Forgetting is an intuitive concept, and it is a regular feature of everyday life; but how does the notion apply to organizations?
The difficulty experienced by the Lutetia when it tried to eliminate all traces of its cellar points to the fact that forgetting is often not an easy task. In some circumstances at least, it requires significant management effort and attention to succeed and, as the reappearing wine list attests, success is anything but guaranteed. This leads to our second question: how should managers manage forgetting?
Third, the accidental loss of all copies of the wine list is a good example of a less positive form of forgetting where an organization forgets something that it needs to remember. Organizations not only learn to do new things, but also forget to do things that they were able to do in the past. Research and practical experience show that organizational knowledge generally decays over time, and that valuable knowledge is often lost. But how this process works, how this kind of forgetting can be minimized, and how the organizational impact of forgetting can be reduced are not yet well understood.
In this chapter, we argue that the intense research focus on organizational learning has obscured the equally important process of organizational forgetting, and that the ongoing discussion of organizational learning needs to be complemented by a much clearer idea of how organizations ‘forget’ or ‘unlearn.’ In spite of significant and growing empirical evidence (Akgun, Byrne, Lynn, and Keskin, 2007; Argote and Epple, 1990; Fernandez and Sune, 2009) supporting the existence of ‘knowledge decay,’ ‘unlearning’ (Nystrom and Starbuck, 1984; Starbuck, 1996), or ‘forgetting’ (Carlson and Rowe, 1976; Smunt and Morton, 1985; Wickelgren, 1976), insufficient attention has been paid in the literature to the processes underlying the loss of organizational knowledge. Furthermore, while there has been some encouraging recent empirical (Martin de Holan and Phillips, 2004) and theoretical (Tsang and Zahra, 2008) work attempting to develop a comprehensive theory of organizational forgetting, there is still some distance to go to understand the types of organizational forgetting and how they relate to one another. Furthermore, we agree with Benkard’s (2000) contention that ‘the strategic implications of organizational forgetting have not been studied,’ and believe this is detrimental to our full understanding of the dynamics of organizational learning, both for organizational theory and strategy (Besanko, Doraszelski, Kryukov, and Satterthwaite, 2010).
We present our argument in four steps. First, we provide an overview of the concepts of learning and forgetting and explain their common roots. Second, we distinguish between the two dominant schools of thought regarding organizational forgetting. Third, we present a comprehensive model of forgetting that integrates and extends existing views on the topic. We conclude by discussing some of the ramifications of a theory of forgetting for management research and practice and present some directions for future research.